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When suffering is good for you

Suffering is a key theme of all religious traditions. They tend to treat suffering as something inevitable, but not intrinsic. That is, we all suffer, but only because something has gone wrong in us, the world, or reality itself.

Christianity and Buddhism (and everything in between) attest that true peace and contentment cannot be found in worldly things, or in the satisfaction of our desires. From a religious point of view, we are all suffering whether we realise it or not. The first step is to realise it.

But it is possible, with sufficient wealth and self-delusion, to distract ourselves from suffering. We can run headlong into distractions – career, relationships, experiences, whatever will feed our pride and fill us with the promise of self-sufficiency.

We can let suffering feel like our opponent in the private drama of achieving success, personal validation, vindication, of finally making it. We can attribute our suffering to not being busy enough, or rich enough, on not having enough holidays, not having the right friends, not having the right distractions.

But these efforts will only intensify our suffering in the long-run. They will turn us into the kind of person who doesn’t know how to suffer, or more importantly, doesn’t know how to let go of the roots of suffering.

Because the roots of suffering lie in our false sense of autonomy, our desire to be in control. At the deepest level of our being there is no “me” to exercise this control, there is no interior agent behind our choices and decisions. Our efforts to feel in control are vain in light of the actual causes and determinants of our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

The mind is very powerful.

It creates an impression of our reality – both the external and internal components. It also makes decisions in accordance with the reality it creates.

But the mind makes these decisions automatically. It weighs the evidence, arrives at a judgment, and thus the decision is made.

It does not require there to be a further arbiter of these decisions, yet we nonetheless have the strong impression that there is a “me” who guides these judgments and makes these decisions.

This is the crux of the problem: the mind creates all our impressions, yet we have an impression of a self, a “me”, who controls the mind. This means that the mind feels bound and controlled by the very impressions it has created.

The mind treats this impression of a self as if it is an actual self. It treats it with care. Like a spoiled child it caters to its whims. It factors this impression of a self into its decision-making so that its decisions are consistent with the illusion of this self being in control.

It creates a center where none exists, and then acts as though that center is vulnerable yet powerful, in control yet susceptible to losing control.

This is the delusion of self that the mind suffers – a delusion the mind itself has created. This is likewise the sin of pride, the root of all sin that seeks to make us the authors of our own glory.

As Isaiah wrote:

You turn things upside down!Shall the potter be regarded as the clay?Shall the thing made say of its maker,“He did not make me”;or the thing formed say of the one who formed it,“He has no understanding”?

But what makes pride so difficult to be rid of, and enlightenment so hard to achieve, is that this delusion of a self persists even when we seek to let go of it.

That is why Christianity invokes grace so strongly – the free gift of holiness and redemption that comes from God in spite of our own efforts. If it came via our efforts it would only increase our pride.

Likewise, the point of enlightenment in Buddhism is that there is no enlightenment once the delusion of an agent, a self who is in control, is erased.

But the mind does exist. And there is, in essence, no difference between the deluded mind and the enlightened mind. It’s the same mind all along.

That’s why suffering can be a gift, when it encourages the mind to stop investing in the false impression of a self. Suffering is, after all, something that makes sense only in the context of a self who suffers, desires, strives and fails.

2 thoughts on “When suffering is good for you”

You didn’t do the usual etymology.
… variant of Latin sufferre “to bear, undergo, endure, carry or put under,” from sub “up, under” (see sub-) + ferre “to carry, bear”
The ‘vibe’ seems to be ‘to allow’.
Suffering seems pretty inevitable in the face of all the things that go on outside our control: economies, wars, orbits.
That we suffer isn’t in doubt. How we suffer is probably more complex.

Each religion has its own concept and framing of suffering, not to mention language. Suffering is good enough as an English umbrella-term.

You’re right though, to suffer can mean “allow” as in “suffer the little children to come unto me”. But it’s a negative connotation, as in “tolerate”, and the other synonyms you quoted above.

Incidentally, the term “passion” as in Christ’s passion on the cross is related to suffering. It too means to undergo or endure…in old philosophical terms an action is something you do, a passion is something done to you, as in active/passive.

It became associated with what we now call emotions…since these are changes in your body/mind brought about by external causes.

Hence a passionate person has strong emotions, and now we think of “passion” as strong feeling, or something that arouses strong feelings in us.

The whole suffering thing is heavily loaded. If we looked at it in Christian terms it would translate into sin and evil. In Buddhist terms it would be “dhukka” which is commonly translated as suffering but also as “unsatisfactoriness”.